Originally Posted by CthippoSecond that. It's nice, but really has nothing to set it apart from a million similar products out there.

Apart from those two lovely upstream USB ports, something which I've wanted to see more of on mains powered USB devices for years.

<rant>
Think about it, you probably have a printed and a scanner, both of which take up a USB port, both of which are only in use a fraction of the time and both of which are plugged into the mains; wouldn't they be the perfect place for, say, a four port hub...

It's not as if they take up a lot of space, or cost a lot of money, I've got a four port passive model that I keep with my laptop, it's 2.5in long and 3/4in high, adding one of those and the power circuits can't be much more work than adding one of those useless "PictBridge" connectors that every printer seems to be sporting.</rant>

Originally Posted by JADSSurely the way forward with these boxes is eSATA and port multipliers?

Well sure, if any computers had eSATA ports. I've yet to see a laptop with one, and it's rare in most desktops too; even still, it's not properly plug-and-play on many systems, even though it's supposed to be. I managed to find a SATA enclosure that also does USB, finally, and it's working quite well.

But I'm just bitter. As a fairly early adopter of SATA, all of my drives in the last... three years or so are SATA, and certainly everything with a decent amount of storage. It was all fine until two months ago or so, since the school network really makes my fileserver useless.

Originally Posted by FirehedWell sure, if any computers had eSATA ports. I've yet to see a laptop with one, and it's rare in most desktops too; even still, it's not properly plug-and-play on many systems, even though it's supposed to be. I managed to find a SATA enclosure that also does USB, finally, and it's working quite well.

There are several add-in cards for notebooks now, so at least for your own computers it shouldn't be a problem. The hybrid enclosure you mentioned is a good find that has a good fall-back mode.

The problems I find with most external drive enclosures is that they often look and feel cheap, have sharp edges on the inside making installation painful, and the worst of them all is that they don't connect reliably. Too often, I've had to re-plug the USB or Firewire cable to get the computer to recognize the drive, it's pretty annoying. One test that these enclosures should go through is a count of how many successful connections it makes out of five tries on each of ten different computers.

I've used an external HD caddy for about 3-4 yrs now. For a couple of years it was one of those original IcyBox enclosures that were illuminated on 3 sides with a 200GB Western Digital drive inside. Unfortunately I found that WD drives ran a little hot and burn't out after a while, switched to Seagate & the new styled IcyBox and going strong after a year.

Never had any problem with getting the laptop/pc to find the drive JeffDM. 100% successful connections here out of proberly something close to 200-300 times i've hooked it up.

i have a Vantec Nexstar3 that supports eSATA and even comes with a bracket to convert an internal SATA port to eSATA. Only caveats are that if you want to hot plug the drive you need a chipset that will support it and it dosent have any ventilation to speak of and my 400GB Hitachi gets warm if i leave on for long periods. the case works great if your plan is to use it for transferring data and backups, but I would not recommend it for 24/7 operation.